Snaxbyte-sized news, on the go
Mistral previewed a trillion-parameter model and promised open weights within the month. It has not said yet what licence those weights will carry. OpenAI put GPT-6 in front of every ChatGPT tier at once. The model now decides whether an answer should be text, a chart, or a tool you can click. Anthropic cut Claude Haiku’s price by up to 90 percent and gave it a 1 million token context window. The cheap-model tier of the price war just got a lot more capable. Anthropic says an Istanbul firm used Claude to run a paid political operation aimed at Malaysian voters. Its report found no sign the campaign reached real communities. The White House ordered federal agencies to stop saying “AI.” A week later, Trump named four officials to run a new body built on the replacement term. Claude for Government left public beta on 30 September 2026. Anthropic is now selling Washington a spending cap, not just a chatbot. OpenAI says it will not release a flagship model it had been testing. The company that races itself on capability now says it will also lose to its own safety bar. DeepSeek shipped a new small model on a new architecture. It undercuts its own flagship on price, not just rivals. Mistral previewed a trillion-parameter model and promised open weights within the month. It has not said yet what licence those weights will carry. OpenAI put GPT-6 in front of every ChatGPT tier at once. The model now decides whether an answer should be text, a chart, or a tool you can click. Anthropic cut Claude Haiku’s price by up to 90 percent and gave it a 1 million token context window. The cheap-model tier of the price war just got a lot more capable. Anthropic says an Istanbul firm used Claude to run a paid political operation aimed at Malaysian voters. Its report found no sign the campaign reached real communities. The White House ordered federal agencies to stop saying “AI.” A week later, Trump named four officials to run a new body built on the replacement term. Claude for Government left public beta on 30 September 2026. Anthropic is now selling Washington a spending cap, not just a chatbot. OpenAI says it will not release a flagship model it had been testing. The company that races itself on capability now says it will also lose to its own safety bar. DeepSeek shipped a new small model on a new architecture. It undercuts its own flagship on price, not just rivals.
Model prices /1M out
GPT-5.6 Luna $1.20 —
Qwen3.8-Max $6.00 —
Mistral Medium 3.5 $7.50 —
Claude Sonnet 5 $10.00 —
GPT-5.6 Terra $12.00 —
GPT-5.6 Sol $20.00 —
Claude Opus 5 $25.00 —
Claude Fable 5 $50.00 —
AI MODEL PROFILE

Claude Sonnet 5

The most capable model most people can reach without paying anything, and the default on the free Claude plan.

Source review Last reviewed October 7, 2026 By Anthropic

The facts at a glance

ProviderAnthropic
TypeGeneral purpose model
Current version or tierclaude-sonnet-5, released 30 June 2026
ModalityText and vision
AccessProprietary
Context or limits1,000,000 token context, 128,000 max output, knowledge cutoff January 2026
Free optionYes. The default model on the free Claude plan
Paid priceUSD 2.00 input and USD 10.00 output per million tokens. Anthropic made this the permanent rate on 10 August 2026, cancelling a scheduled 1 September rise to USD 3.00 and USD 15.00.

Pricing last checked October 7, 2026. Prices change and vary by region. Check the official pricing page ↗

Assessment

What it does well

  • Free to use on the Claude free plan, which is unusual for a model of this class
  • Anthropic states performance close to Opus 4.8 at a much lower price
  • Handles autonomous multi step tool use, including browsers and terminals, that previously needed a larger model

Where it falls short

  • Knowledge cutoff of January 2026 is older than the Opus tier
  • Anthropic documents substantially poorer performance than the Opus models on cybersecurity exploit development, with cyber safeguards on by default

Privacy and data control

On consumer Claude accounts, Anthropic states data is not used for model training unless the user opts in through Model Improvement Privacy Settings, and Incognito chats are excluded even when that setting is on.

The longer read

The introductory price is now permanent

The USD 2.00 and USD 10.00 rates were introduced through 31 August 2026, with a scheduled rise to USD 3.00 and USD 15.00 on 1 September. Anthropic cancelled that rise on 10 August 2026 and made the introductory rate the standard price. Build your cost model on 2.00 and 10.00, not on the higher figures that were originally announced.

How it performs by outcome

We assess products against a job, not a leaderboard. These are the outcomes this entry is compared under.

Worth comparing against

DeepSeek-V4-Flash Teams that need to run a capable model on their own infrastructure Kimi K3 Research teams that need frontier scale weights they can inspect Mistral Medium 3.5 Coding agents running on a small GPU cluster Grok Questions about what is happening right now on the open web and on X

How this profile was produced

Source review. Every fact here is drawn from the provider documentation linked below and checked on the date shown. We have not yet run this entry through a controlled test, and no scoring is implied.

Read the full review methodology →

Primary sources